Ironically, you chose to talk about ugly design and how it prevents anyone from taking a technology seriously on Hacker News.
HN isn't trying to appeal to the average news site user.
Utterly irrelevant.
As irrelevant as the criticism of the LibreOffice website design.
Re:LibreOffice hits 4.0
by BHSPitMonkey on Thursday February 07, 2013 @11:54AM
(#5183133)
Widespread usage and accessibility is specifically a goal of LibreOffice. That is assuredly not the case for HN.
I didn't say that the website was fantastic. I merely said that it hasn't and won't prevent widespread usage and accessibility of LibreOffice.
Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular.
The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website.
I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful.
Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.
I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be.
Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.